tracking

"“It’s not just the transaction,” said Danielle Citron, a law professor and privacy expert at the University of Maryland’s law school. “Powerful companies like Amazon don’t just have what you bought at the grocery store, but they’re also connected with and combined with nearly every aspect of your life,” including where people live and what they buy, read and watch."

"“This is a pretty big deal for law enforcement,” says Jonathan Mayer, a Stanford fellow in computer science and law whose research into Google’s circumvention of cookie-blocking technology helped to spark the class action as well as the search giant’s $17 million settlement with 37 states on the issue.

""What's unfortunate is the huge gap of information - understanding what's happening on the Web and what users know about tracking," said conference organiser and assistant Professor of Computer Science Arvind Narayanan. "We're interested in building tools by the public and for the public. We want to make transparency mutually beneficial between businesses and Web users.""

"Assuming an adversary, whether a criminal or intelligence agency, has a presence on the network, the working premise here is that the first- and third-party cookies dropped by sites and advertisers can be used to tie a user to web traffic without having to worry about dynamic IP addresses,” said the paper, “Cookies that give you away: Evaluating the surveillance implications of web tacking,” written by Dillon Reisman, Steven Englehardt, Christian Eubank, Peter Zimmerman, and Arvind Narayanan."

""We don't need to tell the Web server nearly so much as we do right now," says Jonathan Mayer, a Stanford University grad student and former working group member. "We can limit it to the bare bones required for the Internet to do its thing.""

"I asked Mayer if he believed there was reason to worry that one’s porn-browsing history could be sold — say, to a potential employer — or made public. “I’m not aware of any company intentionally doing either,” he said. “But it’s just one rogue employee or data breach away.”"

""It's awesome," Jennifer Granick, the director of civil liberties at Stanford Law School, told Ars. "On whether the Fourth Amendment applies, it follows the [Supreme Court] case of Jones, as it must. But there were all kinds of side issues which the judge correctly decided. For example, he had to decide if the Fourth Amendment meant a warrant was required for this tracking, and he said it did. There is no car exception to the warrant requirement. In short, he ensured that the Jones opinion means something in the Third Circuit.""

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Nobody likes to wait in line. So today, Amazon removed that unpleasantness from the neighborhood grocery store. At Amazon Go, you walk in, pick up your groceries and walk out.

There are no checkout lines or scanners and almost no employees, just sensors and cameras. But what is that convenience going to cost you? We talk with Geekwire’s Todd Bishop and University of Washington law professor and privacy expert Ryan Calo.

"It was about consumer convenience," says Ryan Calo, a professor of internet and privacy law at the University of Washington. "The idea is that you drop a little file on a person’s computer and then you know them again when you see them."